Monday Links from Lane 2 of the M42 Northbound Vol. LXII

Busy? Extremely. Too busy to furnish links of distinction to the gentry? Of course not

Man Flu - "Man Flu is a crippling and debilitating disorder indiscriminately striking down male members of the human species without warning. The illness is often referred to pejoratively by female members of the species who are in fact immune from the illness as man flu is now known to exclusively attack the XY chromosome carrier. If Man Flu is kind enough not to kill the infected party it will definitely leave him weak, sick, hurting everywhere and in dire need of TLC." All the facts, and many pernicious myths dispelled, in this excellent resource dedicated to modern medical science's greatest challenge.

River Maps - "Rivers have been a key part of urban life for centuries. They have provided us with drinking water, protection, and a transit network that links us from one settlement to the next. I wanted to create a series of maps that gives people a new way to look at rivers: a much more modern, urban type of portrayal. So I turned to the style of urban transit maps pioneered by Harry Beck in the 1930s for the London Underground." Cool geography lessons from Daniel Huffman.

The Someone You're Not - Ray Towler spent almost thirty years in prison for child rape, before DNA evidence finally proved his innocence. Here Mike Sager examines his case, and the way he has rebuilt his life since his release. He loves work. He got out May 5 and started working June 21. "Hell, I've been vacationing for thirty years."

Shackleton’s Antarctica in colour, 1915 - "These are Frank Hurley’s famous early colour photographs of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated ‘Endurance’ voyage, as part of the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-1917. Hurley was the official photographer on the expedition. Early in 1915, their ship ‘Endurance’ became inexorably trapped in the Antarctic ice. Hurley managed to salvage the photographic plates by diving into mushy ice-water inside the sinking ship in October 1915."

Well, Actually: Why you are not getting laid - "As software developers, we develop habits that allow us to build products that work and do not fail under stress. Every software developer knows what an "off-by-one" error is, and like the Karate Kid, we train extensively so we can avoid those traps. We learn how to avoid these and other similar software problems and we sharpen our skills to find logic errors... But our engineering strength is also our social weakness." Miguel de Icaza explains how software developers become "patronizing douchebags."

At the Nuclear Power Plant - "One Russian blogger has paid a visit to the modern Russian nuclear plant. Normally it is forbidden to take photos there, but they have made an exception for him. So now we have a rare chance to see what’s inside of the Russian most modern power plant."

Grand Central's multimillion-dollar secrets - "If you want to know what the very latest tech toys are, don't go to Best Buy or an Apple Store. Go to the lost-and-found department at Grand Central Terminal." Daniel Terdiman takes a look at some of the lesser-known aspects of New York's famous railway station; be aware that, as is pointed out in the comments, the stuff about Roosevelt's secret bulletproof train is hogwash.

Five Things TV Chefs Do That Are Wrong - "As hard as it may be to swallow, the people who cook on TV are occasionally wrong. It's not just pronunciations (it's "broo-SKET-tah", damn it), it's techniques. Some of them are TV tricks using previously prepared food, and some of them are just plain errors." Dave Lieberman doesn't actually suggest using this list as the basis of a drinking game, but it has potential.

El Camino del Rey 2010 - "El Caminito del Rey (English: The King's little pathway) is a walkway or via ferrata, now fallen into disrepair, pinned along the steep walls of a narrow gorge in El Chorro, near Álora in the province of Málaga, Spain. The name is often shortened to Camino del Rey... The walkway is one meter (3 feet and 3 inches) in width, and rises over 100 meters (350 feet) above the river below. It is currently in a highly deteriorated state and there are numerous sections where part of or the entire concrete top has collapsed away. The result is large open air gaps that are bridged only by narrow steel beams or other support fixtures. Very few of the original handrails exist..." - none of which stopped Daniel Ahnen from making his way along it with an HD camera attached to his head. Switch to the 720p HD version and go fullscreen for the best effect

I just want to know whether the ruskies ever tried to run a nuclear powerstation with a ZX81 (as its adverts stated it could at one point), I can just imagine ram pack wobble being responsible for Cherynobyl

At the Nuclear Power Plant - "One Russian blogger has paid a visit to the modern Russian nuclear plant. Normally it is forbidden to take photos there, but they have made an exception for him. So now we have a rare chance to see what’s inside of the Russian most modern power plant."

I like how someone brought in their old HiFi spares to plug into the control PC.

I always wondered, is vertigo something anyone can train themselves out of or are those people who climb in this way just 'lucky'? I'm not especially scared of heights but standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon my legs literally became paralysed - I doubt I got closer than 3 feet from the edge but I felt I would fall off. The thing is, if you do fall you are dead, so can you practice? Same goes for those who work on skyscrapers, etc... do they learn or is it how they are made?

When I first started it was just a bunch of stuff I'd come across over the last few days, together with some things I remembered having liked in the last few months that I could easily track down via Google.

Once I got drawn into doing it every week, I started digging through older stores of links; sometimes it took a while to find where something had moved to, even though it was on the same site on which I had originally seen it, but which had grown massively in the intervening five years

After two or three months I was at the point where I was having to go back through the whole lot to be sure I hadn't already posted something - usually I'd thought of posting it but there was already something similar the same week, or it just didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the week, but the fact of having thought about posting it induced false memory syndrome.

IIRC it was Easter weekend that I finally settled down and ensured that all existing links were tagged as "in-mlftb", together with a tag for the volume in which they appeared (e.g. "mlftb3"), in my online bookmark-tracking system of choice. I also went through the couple of hundred links I had in the system (my use of which long pre-dated Monday Links) that hadn't yet appeared, and tagged those that seemed like suitable candidates as "4mlftb" (although since then, some that I didn't feel like tagging at the time I have changed my mind about and have posted, and there are others tagged "4mlftb" that I probably won't use.)

I don't have more than a couple of hundred "4mlftb" links in reserve at the moment; the system tells me that there are 624 "in-mlftb", though I haven't yet updated it with the above - that figure includes some, but not all, bonus links, so it isn't truly accurate. Last time I checked, seven or eight of the "in-mlftb" links had gone 404, and there was one which went 404 in the very week that I was going to post it (I'm going to automate the process of checking them at some point, for no very good reason.)

These days, most of the stuff I post has come my way within the preceding month or so, but occasionally I dig up something I first bookmarked donkeys years ago. Whenever I find something I think other people (not all of them, but at least some) will like as much as I do, it gets saved with the "4mlftb" tag.

With what I've said here, those who can be bothered can easily track down my online collection as it's all publicly accessible; just remember that a fair few of the older "4mlftb" links on there will almost certainly never appear here, while the recent additions will probably appear within the next week or three. Anyway, if you go and peek, you'll ruin the surprise